Blue Water High

Shelley Birse was born in Lake Macquarie. She studied Communications and was lucky enough to score a traineeship with the ABC. Fifteen years later, she's still being paid to make stuff up.

Shelley's writing and script production credits appear on a multitude of award-winning programs, including ‘Wildside', ‘Love is a Four Letter Word', ‘Young Lions', ‘Blue Water High' and, most recently, the screen adaptation of Tim Winton's
Lockie Leonard
.

First published 2007 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
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Copyright © Southern Star Entertainment Pty Ltd 2007

Film Finance Corporation Australia presents a Southern Star Entertainment
production in association with New South Wales Film and Television Office
produced in association with Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Australian Broadcasting
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© 2005 Australian Film Finance Corporation Limited, Southern Star
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Birse, Shelley.
Blue water high.

For children.
ISBN 978 0330 42366 3 (pbk.).

1. Surfing – Juvenile fiction. 2. Teenage girls –
Juvenile fiction. I. Title. II. Title : Blue water high
(Television program).

A823.3

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Blue Water High

Shelley Birse

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Any work of this nature inevitably comes from the contribution of many heads and I want to acknowledge the creativity of the other Blue Water High series writers: Noel Price, Mimi Butler, Jennifer Mellet, John Armstrong, Michael Miller, Kym Goldsworthy, Kristen Dunphy and Marissa Cooke – all of whom wrote scripts it was a guilty privilege to plunder.

So there's an ideal way to prepare for the biggest day in your life …

And then there's today.

Fly Watson had been on the bus for fifty-six hours. Okay, there'd been a pee break here and there. But the fifty-six hours didn't include the pee breaks. She'd been sitting on that hard little seat watching the countryside whiz by for so long it felt like her knees had been bolted into right angles.

In an ideal world she would've made the 3314-kilometre journey from the Margaret River to Sydney two days ago. She would've spent some time getting to know the Blue Water break. She would've sat on the beach watching the currents sucking in and out, like some huge water-breathing dragon was snoozing just off the coast. She would've gone to bed early last night and woken well rested this morning. She would've had a high protein breakfast, taken a run on the beach and had a good, long warm-up session.

But Fly was not doing any of that. No, three hours before the finals to get into the best surfing school in the
country began, Fly was, in fact, in a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. She was waiting for a toasted cheese sanger and trying to work out whether she would need surgery if she ever wanted to straighten her legs again.

Not that she was complaining. Fly had been trained out of complaining at a very early age. It just wasn't stood for in the Watson house. Complaining was a crime of the highest order. ‘Whiner's disease' her mother called it. And complaining was tolerated only when there had been a very, very, very unfortunate turn of events.

So instead of complaining about the fact that she couldn't get to Sydney sooner, Fly did what preparation she could before leaving home. She spent hours on the internet in the school library, glued to the Solar Blue website. She printed off maps of the break. She stared at the biographies of all the previous winners, wondering what special quality they all shared until her eyes were red and square and had their own screensaver.

And anyway, she wasn't the only one doing the miles. The competition for a place at Solar Blue Surf Academy was Australia-wide. If she was coming from the left ankle of the country, she knew there would be other people coming from as far as the right nostril too. That's how special this chance was.

The girl behind the counter flipped Fly's sandwich and pressed it down hard. She was really hammering that thing. If it got any thinner Fly could slip it in an envelope and post it home. She heard a bus start up outside the window and grimaced as it ground up the gears. She turned to see it ride awkwardly up and over the curb on its way out of the driveway. She wasn't surprised – the driver looked like an escapee from a retirement village.

Things suddenly went very still inside Fly's brain.

Her wrinkly old driver …

Her bus riding over the curb …

Her bus driving away …

WITHOUT HER!

The bell over the door screamed in protest as Fly flew through it. She dodged the parked cars, scanning for the bus. It was already at the exit, blinker on, waiting for a gap in the traffic. She screamed her lungs out. She flapped her arms. In reply the bus belted a huge cloud of diesel at her, and took off down the road.

Fly stood there in the biting dawn, cars rocketing past her. This was not how it was supposed to end. It hadn't even started for goodness' sake!

Maybe this could be considered a very, very, very unfortunate turn of events.

Maybe even she, the mistress of ‘sucking it up and getting on with it' might be allowed to have just a little grizzle now?

Then the bus suddenly swerved to the left and pulled off the side of the road. It skidded to an awkward stop, its bum rising in the air with the sudden shift in plans. The doors hissed open and the wrinkly old driver puffed down the stairs just as Fly reached them.

‘Forgot the little one,' he panted, and rushed straight past her.

For a second she thought he was talking about her. But why was he running the other way? And then she realised ‘the little one' wasn't her. It was the six-year-old boy sitting two rows behind her.

Fly climbed back onto the bus and tried to stop glaring at the second hand on her watch, eating down the time
until she would be officially late. She could feel a ball of tension starting to work up a tidy little knot in her tummy. When she thought about it, that knot had been there ever since she first saw the announcement for the Solar Blue Academy surf competition. It was in a surfing magazine she had borrowed from her best friend. The ad took up a full page. It had shimmering blue letters and it asked the question:
How would you like to spend a year of your life training in the best surf school in the country for free?

They shouldn't have bothered with the question mark really. The question mark was a waste of ink because who in their right mind was going to say, ‘Not much, really. I'd rather just hang out here in my ordinary life, thanks anyway'? Every year, the school took seven of the best young surfers and trained them like crazy. As if that weren't a big enough prize, at the end of the year two of them got wildcard places on the world circuit.

Where was the driver? She stared down at her watch again and cursed that speedy second hand. Time was weird like that. When you were waiting for a double period of science to finish the seconds flicked over lazily, dragging their feet like a tired two-year-old. When you actually needed to be somewhere it was like the seconds could feel your antsiness and they sprinted for you. Fly couldn't stand it any longer. She pushed her bag under the seat and stomped off the bus to see what on earth could be taking so long. Bad move.

As it turned out, the little one and his mother had failed to board the bus because he'd somehow managed to get himself stuck in the portaloo. By the time she got around the corner of the servo, a group of other passengers had wrestled the portaloo down onto the ground. It lay on its
side like a green and yellow Dalek that Dr Who had managed to slay. A couple of passengers were fiddling with a small square plate on the bottom of the loo. And a number of them were staring at Fly, murmuring things like, ‘She might be small enough to squeeze through', and, ‘She really is quite tiny, isn't she?'

And so it was that on this, the most important day of her fifteen-year-old life, Fly Watson found herself waist-deep in truck drivers' whizzle, dragging a small child from a portable toilet.

Excellent preparation.

On the upside, the portaloo had a small mirror in it. And as she jammed the top half of her body through the hole in the bottom, Fly caught sight of herself. Blue eyes, tanned skin, freckles dotted across her neat little nose from too much time in the sun. Fly liked her face – probably a good thing given it was fairly attached to the rest of her head. It was a simple face, a kind face … She gave herself a smile in the mirror and it was then that she copped a look at her hair. Fly's hair was long and wavy and it usually hung from the top of her head and pointed down towards the ground. Today she looked like a cockatoo had landed on her head and danced the Macarena there for three hours.

Generally Fly had to be reminded to check in with the mirror every now and then. Without the portaloo rescue she would've tumbled out of the bus looking like she'd been using her head as a toilet brush, which wasn't that far from the truth now she thought about it.